


oh come let us adore (her)

by Nemainofthewater



Series: Good Omens AU [3]
Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, Christmas, Don't copy to another site, F/M, Gen, Good Omens AU, RipFic, TimeShip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-20
Updated: 2019-12-20
Packaged: 2021-02-25 04:41:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21870247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemainofthewater/pseuds/Nemainofthewater
Summary: The first Christmas. Third story in the Good Omens AU.
Relationships: Gideon/Rip Hunter
Series: Good Omens AU [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1462291
Comments: 6
Kudos: 14





	oh come let us adore (her)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ams75](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ams75/gifts).



> Happy birthday!

“Christmas? You want to celebrate Christmas?” Rip scowled at her, not looking away from where he was carefully placing a cloth nappy onto the changing mat. With short, economical motions he laid Sara on the mat, opened her old nappy tucked the clean side of it under her bottom before gently wiping the worse of the mess off her. Gideon contributed by manifesting her halo in colourful flashes to distract Sara, ignoring the disapproving glances that Rip was shooting her. Her Side never checked up on miracles. In any case, he was just jealous that her halo shone a much prettier purple than his earthy brown. For her part, Sara bore it with dignity and a tangible sense of bemusement at the proceedings.

“We’re meant to be giving Sara a normal, human upbringing, aren’t we?” Gideon protested, “And holidays are part of those!”

“But Christmas of all things?” Rip patted Sara gently on her (newly clean) behind and gently cradled her in his arms, lulling her to sleep. “A time of year when people strive to do better? To look beyond themselves and help others in need, the time of year where ‘God bless you’ and ‘good will to all’ hang heavy on the air?”

Gideon snorted. “You’re so dramatic, angel,” she said, not unfondly. “Christmas is a time of mass consumerisms and overindulgence. Where families who hate each other are forced into close quarters in the name of ‘festivities’. There’s so much to do around Christmas that there’s no room for actual _sentiment_.”

Surprising for a divine and an occult being, neither Rip nor Gideon tended to celebrate Christmas, per se. It was hard to see the fun in the holiday when a) you could remember the event in questions and had been vaguely traumatised by the amount of animal dung you’d stepped in (Gideon) or b) it was very much a working holiday and you were kept so busy trying to keep the flow of goodwill for all etc etc running while simultaneously that the season passed in a blur of sugar and insulting replicas of angel wings (Rip). No, the holiday- especially in England (which to Rip and Gideon was functionally the whole world)- was very much divorced from its religious meaning and was therefore, in Rip’s opinion, entirely superfluous. 

“You just want an excuse to eat an inordinate amount of chocolate,” Rip said.

“What do you take me for? Of course I do,” Gideon said, “I’ve never denied my sweet tooth. But more importantly angel, we’re trying to raise Sara as humanly as possible, right? So she’s going to have all that commercialised Christmas stuff shoved down her throat anyway. It’s your choice whether she grows up thinking that Father Christmas is the guy on the Coca Cola adverts or whether she has a proper family Christmas with all that-” Gideon waved a hand vaguely, “-Peace on Earth, Christmas miracle, angels looking down on you crap.”

Rip glared at her and covered Sara’s ears with his hand. “Not in front of the baby!” he hissed. They both glanced down to see whether the infant Antichrist had been unduly affected by her near brush with profanity. Sara slumbered on.

“I get your point, though,” Rip said, “And I suppose it would be strange if we didn’t make some sort of effort. Fine. We’ll celebrate Christmas. But nothing too over the top. Just a nice, family holiday.”

#

“Gideon,” Rip said dryly, “You do realise that Sara’s only sixteen months old? I doubt she’ll be able to tell whether or not the Christmas tree is real or artificial. Never mind whether or not the doves are the right shade of white.” He frowned. “And I still don’t think that doves are a good idea. What are supposed to do with them afterwards? Eat them?”

Gideon gasped; hands clasped dramatically against her chest. “You want to _eat_ Teeny and Jonas?”

Rip sighed heavily. “You’ve already named them,” he said, “Of course you’ve already named them. Gideon, we really don’t have enough room for-”

“But don’t you want Sara to grow up with a healthy respect for all living things?” she replied, “So really, having pets is-” she looked up at him through her lashes, eyes large and pleading, “-in the service of the Greater Good.”

“Get thee behind me, temptress,” Rip said, “And don’t think I haven’t noticed you haven’t answered my question.”

“But they’re a breeding pair Rip,” Gideon said, “It’d be cruel to separate them now!”

“The Twelves Days of Christmas isn’t a shopping list,” Rip said, “And I’m not going to be the one cleaning dove-” he glanced over at Sara’s crib, “-poo from all around the house. But what I meant was you promised not to go overboard!”

“Pshaw,” Gideon said, “You think that this going overboard?” She blinked and in a flurry of rearranged atoms a chocolate fountain appeared between them, slightly confused at its own existence. The heady scent of chocolate permeated the air bringing with it memories of the Aztec court (for Gideon) and the feeling of aching and abused knees (for Rip).

Rip had never quite got over being awoken at three in the morning by his college porter (he had been posing as an Oxford Don that decade as there) to find that Gideon had shipped him a crate of cocoa beans perfectly timed to explode all over the college green. He still wasn’t sure how she’d managed it, only that the gimlet gaze of the porter had stymied his attempts to Miracle the beans away, instead forcing him to pick them up one by one. By hand. Those trousers would never be the same. He still had them somewhere in the bowels of his back room.

“Gideon!”

“Don’t worry about it,” Gideon said breezily, “Head Office is used to weird miracles this time of year. This one should slip under the radar.”

She leant forward and stuck the tip of her finger into the fountain.

“Mmm,” she said licking the chocolate off her hand, “You should try some of this, angel. It’s delicious.”

“Eep,” said Rip trying not to look at her hands and her mouth, then realising that to all intents and purposes they were married (several times over) then thinking of the implications and the consequences if his side found out, but then he was already subverting the Apocalypse...

“What was that?”

“I mean-” he hesitated, torn. Gave a quick look round. Sara was still asleep. Then he looked Up. And then, more carefully, Down. “Oh, go on then. It is Christmas, I suppose.”

He reached out and, carefully, tenderly, took Gideon’s hand in his own. And- maintaining eye contact all the while- gave the smudge of chocolate on her thumb a demure lick. “You’re right,” he said, “It is delicious.”

“Well,” Gideon said, “We do have an entire chocolate fountain. And nowhere to be for a while. And Sara is sleeping quite deeply…”

Rip swallowed briefly. And with a blink the curtains drew themselves, shielding them both from the prying eyes of the passersby outside. “Well,” he said, “It would be wasteful not to take advantage…”

#

Rip ran a careful eye over the table. The silver was shining brightly, polished to an inch of its life. The table, a dark mahogany from the 17th century, was swathed in a snowy tablecloth and adequately protected from any accidental drips from the numerous candles. The poinsettias, carefully posed in the middle of the table, perked up as he glared at them, their drooping leaves snapping up to military attention. In the corner of the room, the Christmas tree glowed softly. No angel was to be found gracing its tip: that was a point that Rip had not budged on. No matter how Gideon had pouted. Instead there was perfectly nice star, thank you very much. A nice star that hadn’t randomly transformed into a brown coat-wearing angel with fluffy wings in the past five hours, despite Gideon’s best efforts.

“I think,” he said, “We’re ready.”

Gideon pressed a glass of mulled wine into his hands (one of her finest inventions and one that she had got a commendation for Downstairs). “You look like you need it,” she said.

Rip sighed, running his hands through his distractedly. “It’s been a while since I’ve properly interacted with humans,” he said, “It’s hard. To watch them wither and die. It’s easier to act as a benevolent guardian from afar.”

“Unless our plan works, you won’t have to see these ones wither away,” Gideon said. She kept her voice deliberately light: they had both lived and loved various humans over the course of 6,000 years. That was inevitable. But she also knew that Rip had disappeared for forty years or so back in the 1500s and had returned with lines of grief marring his face and a small rosary that he kept wrapped around his wrist. It was still there: soot-blackened and dented, but otherwise as pristine as the day it had been minted.

“Seeing as they’ll all be dead in eleven years. Ten and a half. Whatever. Alongside the rest of the world.”

“Not helpful.”

Gideon shrugged. “No use worrying now,” she said. She paused. Sniffed. “Can you smell something burning…?”

With a decidedly unangelic curse, Rip shoved his mulled wine back into Gideon’s hands and sprinted toward the kitchen. A few moments later, a large cloud of black smoke drifted out from the kitchen and the fire alarm started its high pitch whine. Gideon silenced it with a thought.

”Everything’s going well then?”

“Piss off!”

Rip had just managed to salvage the turkey (with the judicious application of miracles that he would have to think of an excuse for later) when the Steins showed up.

Martin and Clarissa Stein were a middle-aged couple who had an (adopted) son around the same age as Sara. Jax was a well-behaved child and he and Sara got on very well indeed, sitting together for hours and babbling nonsense at each other. Only one thing had exploded in their vicinity in the two months since they had met which both Gideon and Rip considered a Good Sign. A sign of progress. Sara would have to have a playmate, preferably more than one, if she wanted to be properly socialised. Several parenting books said so and Rip agreed.

The added benefit of Jax (their son)’s companionship was the Steins themselves. Both were ferociously intelligent and Clarissa in particular was determined to adopt the ‘poor young couple’ when she had learnt that neither of them had any family to speak of.

Rip was fairly certain that they believed that he had grown up in a cult and that Gideon’s family either worked for the mob or was composed entirely of Tories, hence the distance between her and them. It was rather fun, slipping in as many references to their shared past as possible without making them suspicious, though Gideon had almost given him a heart attack the first time she’d mentioned they’d known each other ‘since the Beginning’. Luckily neither Martin nor Clarissa had heard the capital letter. Most importantly, the Steins also had impeccable taste in alcohol and this evening was no different.

Sitting around the beautifully set table, Jax and Sara cooing at each other in their high chairs and the adults finally having a conversation revolving around more than whether they would ever get the food stain out of the carpet (no: Sara’s infernal powers manifested in strange ways and when she didn’t like her food, she really didn’t like it) or whose turn it was to wake up in the middle of the night (not that Rip or Gideon slept but it was the principle of the matter), Rip couldn’t help but think that this was the calm before the storm. That they would fail, and the world would end, and he and Gideon would be forced onto separate sides. That they would leave and then have to face each other over the battlefield.

Violently he forced his thoughts away from the future. Looked up at Gideon. And smiled.

Because the world could be ending. But at least he had the now.

**Author's Note:**

> I am on Tumblr as [Nemainofthewater ](https://nemainofthewater.tumblr.com)


End file.
